THE PHILIPPINES: Candidate for Pallbearer

“If he were my father,” said a physician, “I wouldn’t care if he were President or not. I’d tell him to relax and live longer.” But President Elpidio Quirino of the Philippine Republic was in no mood to relax. During the past three weeks, plainly showing the strain of a gout condition and the gastric ulcer operations he underwent in July at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, 62-year-old Quirino has campaigned with a martyr’s zeal to save his administration from overthrow by former Defense Minister Ramon Magsaysay at the polls next month. “I don’t give a damn what happens to my life,” Quirino said as he went from rally to rally accompanied by a doctor and nurse. “I’ve already dedicated it to my country and my God, but I may yet be a pallbearer at the funerals of some of those who say I won’t live until the election.”

In sharp contrast to Magsaysay, who habitually roamed from barrio to barrio in Harry Truman-type sport shirts, Quirino traveled by plane and yacht, made his speeches clad in impeccable, gleaming white. “I’m already known as a man of the people,” he said.

The President had made a fateful decision in the past week: to make political capital out of his opponent’s strongest asset—the tacit U.S. support of the Magsaysay candidacy. As Philippine President for the past four years, Quirino has busily courted the favor of Washington, without whose aid his nation could have achieved neither independence nor prosperity. Only a few weeks ago he was publicly hinting—without a shred of evidence—that his recent visit to the U.S. would result in even more U.S. favors. Last week Quirino turned sharply about-face and placed his Liberal Party squarely on record as opposed to any U.S. interference whatever with “the sovereignty and independence” of the Philippines. “Today it is clear,” he said, “that I am the candidate of the Filipino people and the other is the candidate of the American people.”

A few days later, Quirino lashed out at a Nacionalista Party suggestion that U.S. observers be invited over to guarantee a clean election. “Are we going to allow a foreign power to come here again?” he asked. “Why do we have to go 10,000 miles across the ocean to ask America to help us? I shall never permit foreign troops to come here again.”

“Cheap jingoism,” sniffed Magsaysay’s Campaign Manager Carlos Romulo. But Quirino, a shrewd old politician, seemed to think that in “American interference” he had at last found a winning issue.